Paul Bunyan and the lumberjack lore is strong here in Northern Minnesota with our roadside attractions, festivals and other namesakes. But the history of the lumberjack has complex roots, as explained by writer and historian Willa Hammitt Brown.
Growing up, Willa spent a lot of time in Minnesota’s Paul Bunyan country – one of her earliest childhood photos is of her sitting in the giant cupped hand of the Paul Bunyan statue in Akeley. In her new book Gentlemen of the Woods: Manhood, Myth, and the American Lumberjack, she dives into the past and separates fact from glorified folklore revealing the real lumberjack and his place in American history.
In a recent What We’re Reading interview, Willa spoke to the conflicting versions of the lumberjack illustrated in her book--one of “filth and iniquity” and the other more wholesome, gentlemanly folk-hero that inspired Paul Bunyan.
She explained, “The truth really lies in the balance between the two.” As towns and business grew in the Northwoods between the 1870s to 1900, a growing middle class trying to attract people to the area, as well as corporations trying to retreat from the lumber business after striping the land of trees, worked to dismiss the commonly held stereotype of lumberjacks as “transient workers with no ethics, no home…filling towns with sin.” A more wholesome image of the lumberjack arose from this but wasn’t very accurate either.
Willa strived to include the lumberjack point of view in Gentlemen of the Woods, but firsthand accounts were hard to find. She explained, “What's interesting is to try to see it from the lumberjacks’ point of view but you're talking about men who are mostly illiterate, who are transient, who don't leave a ton of records. And those records they do leave, a lot of people don't think to give--it's why I spent so much time in really small-town archives because that's where some of that will end up--if it ends up anywhere. There's a point where I was even putting out classified ads in newspapers: ‘Does anybody have their grandfathers’ stories?’”
Gentlemen of the Woods also speaks to the invention of Paul Bunyan, originally created for an advertisement; the broken treaties with the Anishinaabe by “renegade white loggers” who considered the land as “resources to be reaped, not resources to be kept and used generationally”; as well as current day use of the lumberjack icon and folklore for nostalgia and tourism.
The book is well written, extensively researched and includes many illustrations, photographs and images which greatly enrich the reading experience. Learn more about Willa Hammitt Brown and Gentlemen of the Woods on her website.
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